Yah...I eat plants...jealous aren't you

[Grammy Ginger]

I have orange and grapefruit trees absolutely loaded with ambrosia right now. BUT the most appreciated of all are the first three cara cara oranges from my fledgling citrus hedge. Never in my life have I tasted such sweet and delectable fruit--orange sherbet with a hint of strawberry....oh my...

While we ate with juice dripping down our chins, my husband declared, "This...is why we grow our own--not to save money--not to be self-sufficient--but to eat the most delicious food available on the planet."

And yes, I am highly addicted to homegrown fruit and eat far more than my 2-3 servings a day. After planting two more peaches, a fig, another apple, and two grapes last week, it will only get worse. Once these are old enough to bear, I should have homegrown fruit every month of the year. I call that wealth.

In the deep mulch under and around every low-pruned fruit tree and vine, I plant all manner of annual/perennial seasonal veggies and melons in true permaculture style. I cannot eat store lettuce, kale, or citrus anymore. My backyard ruined me.

Who else knows what I'm talking about?

[MINNIE]

OOH -I only wish I knew what you mean. I can't garden much where I live, and our growing season is too short for citrus.

But I do buy a lot of my produce from local farmers, and i believe I can taste a difference. I wouldn't have believed that freshly dug potatoes, for example, would taste better than store-bought but I'm convinced they do .

Enjoy those cara caras!

Yes, I am jealous .

[Mayapples]

I know what you're talking about with regard to what can be grown in a more northern climate, but as for those oranges ... why yes, yes I am jealous.

[Grammy Ginger]

OH! I don't want You All to be jealous of me. We all eat plants here. Homegrown is better but plants of any kind are miles better than dead animals or secretions. I was sort of poking fun of SAD people who will never read this. Sorry.

My mom talked about a diabetic friend of hers that packs away huge portions of SAD food. I responded that no tasty bite is worth eating if it causes me to suffer blood sugar tests, insulin injections, blindness, or amputations. That's what I really mean.

I don't have much room either but grow a lot of variety in my small space from Grow a Little Fruit Tree: Simple Pruning Techniques for Small-Space, Easy-Harvest Fruit Trees by Ann Ralph. I do permaculture/guild planting sort of as described in Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Hemenway. Finally, I deep mulch with alfalfa, straw, and compost similar to Gardening Without Work: For the Aging, the Busy, and the Indolent by Ruth Stout.

[michaelswarm]

When I was growing up, my parents home had both fruit trees and a garden. I remember in summer the amazing peaches, pears and apples, tomatoes, onions, lettuce, corn, etc. Always fresh picked better than produce from the market.

I also remember snowy winters before NAFTA, when onions, potatoes and cabbage ruled, unless you had canned or frozen vegetables.

But then I moved away, and no more garden. But produce from local farmers always tasted better than supermarket produce.

Here in Mexico things are not as bad as US. People eat more produce. The size of the produce section is 4-8x the size of supermarket produce sections in the US. (That means they move 4-8x the volume of produce, since it’s perishable.) Convenience stores sell produce. Tomatoes taste like tomatoes. Local seasonal produce in abundance is often sold from the back of a pickup truck cheap, and always tastes best when the most abundant and cheapest: watermelons, melons, pineapples and mangoes.

Always take my kids shopping, so they grow up remembering the colorful tasty fresh produce.

One day hope to again have home with vegetable garden, or maybe even a farm?

[Plumerias]

Oh, sigh, my last real gardening experience was the 2008 growing season. We sold the house in 2009 and went on the road in the RV. While I do have some potted herbs sometimes, I sorely miss digging in the soil and eating cherry tomatoes straight from the plant while doing so. But farmers markets are indeed the next best thing, and we've been blessed to shop at them in far more places than I could count. It's been fun to learn what grows where. But am I jealous of you GG? Heck yeah! Confused too. Stone crops (your peaches) and pome crops (your apples) require vernalization (cold) to set fruits, grapes too I think. Citrus is sensitive to cold, which can actually kill the tree if prolonged. So how the heck do you grow both where you are?

And I love the food porn: "sweet and delectable fruit--orange sherbet with a hint of strawberry....oh my..."

[Grammy Ginger]

Stone crops (your peaches) and pome crops (your apples) require vernalization (cold) to set fruits, grapes too I think. Citrus is sensitive to cold, which can actually kill the tree if prolonged. So how the heck do you grow both where you are?

It's all in choosing the right low-chill variety on the right rootstock for the area. Grapes, mangos, figs, and citrus grow like weeds in our 9B climate. So do Anna and Golden Dorset Apples, Flavorosa Pluot, Katy Apricot, all mulberries, some blackberries and raspberries, Santa Rosa Plums, and Florida Prince, MidGold, and Florida Pride Peaches. We protect baby trees with shade cloth in summer. On the few days of frost, which we don't get every year, we cover sensitive plants. Covering is possible because of summer pruning to force plants to grow no more than 6-8 ft. tall. Deep mulching and living mulch from permaculture make the soil cooler in summer and warmer in winter. Growing up here we learned in kindergarten that AZ has (now had) five Cs of industry: copper, cattle, citrus, climate, and cotton. As I child I remember acres upon acres of cotton fields, miles of citrus groves, and ranches of all descriptions. All that's gone now except the great climate and miles upon miles of houses.

[Pumpkin Pete]

Indeed. After living in a townhouse for a number of years with limited space for growing veggies (I did have a very productive papaya) last year I moved and now have a quarter acre property to work with.
I'm now self sufficient in veggies but it will take a few years before I start seeing production from my fruit trees.
In the meantime I have two beds of rockmelons which are very productive. It's hard to beat a home grown rockmelon which you allow to fully ripen on the vine. I keep on pinching out the runners and they just keep on producing.

https://sites.google.com/site/qhuccommunitygarden/peter-s-food-tips-from-our-garden

[Plumerias]

Stone crops (your peaches) and pome crops (your apples) require vernalization (cold) to set fruits, grapes too I think. Citrus is sensitive to cold, which can actually kill the tree if prolonged. So how the heck do you grow both where you are?

It's all in choosing the right low-chill variety on the right rootstock for the area. Grapes, mangos, figs, and citrus grow like weeds in our 9B climate. So do Anna and Golden Dorset Apples, Flavorosa Pluot, Katy Apricot, all mulberries, some blackberries and raspberries, Santa Rosa Plums, and Florida Prince, MidGold, and Florida Pride Peaches. We protect baby trees with shade cloth in summer. On the few days of frost, which we don't get every year, we cover sensitive plants. Covering is possible because of summer pruning to force plants to grow no more than 6-8 ft. tall. Deep mulching and living mulch from permaculture make the soil cooler in summer and warmer in winter. Growing up here we learned in kindergarten that AZ has (now had) five Cs of industry: copper, cattle, citrus, climate, and cotton. As I child I remember acres upon acres of cotton fields, miles of citrus groves, and ranches of all descriptions. All that's gone now except the great climate and miles upon miles of houses.

Wow, I had no idea that was possible. I do understand that we've bred all sorts of varieties for differing ecosystems/climate zones, but I just plain didn't think so much in the way of more temperate climate things could be grown where you are. Thanks for the lessons.

[Sandy Sue]

Where do you live? I live in east central Florida and for the last few years we've been having problems with citrus because of an insect which spreads a disease to citrus causing it to green too early and not get ripe. For awhile you couldn't even find citrus trees to buy.
We moved back to Florida after my husband retired and I would love to grow citrus again.

[Grammy Ginger]

Arizona...there have been agriculture inspection stations at border crossings into AZ at least as long as I can remember. The state is very protective of the citrus here because of all the problems found in Florida and California. So far, it has worked.